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Are exams a good thing?

Well, I think it's sort of a double-edged sword. Exams can be a good thing. They can separate the wheat from the chaf, per se. They can tell where some students need extra work, and whether or not a student can cut it in a certain advanced subject, or pass the grade.

Then again, some students - I have friends like this - aren't very good test takers. One friend, really smart (even smarter than me, probably), got a 17 on her ACT (a standardized test in America that judges your apptitude for college; equivocable to the SAT). A decent score on the ACT is a about a 23 or 24. The highest you can get is a 36. I got a 20 on my first try. Sometimes these tests can misjudge a student because he or she doesn't think in standardized test format.

Here in America, in a student's opinion, testing has gone overboard as well. But I agree that it does give an independent assessment. Though, when the teaching becomes aimed at passing tests in leu of educating the student properly, like in America, there's a problem.

P.S.: Did I spell "in leu" correctly? I like using that phrase, but I'm not always sure how to spell it.

Gracias for the spelling. And in all my classes, I hear all the time, "You're going to need to know this for the ACT (or implant test)." I just want to learn; I like learning, and I don't want to have to worry about know this exact rule, and how to do this exactly right.

It's also slighty similar here in China. Quite often you don't need to be able to speak fluent (or even understandable!) English in order to pass an exam. The main thing is to know grammar and its rules.

I was not trained as a teacher, and therefore do not have a level of grammar that many of my students possess. But I do know I speak English better than they do :wink:

The questions could also do with updating - I'm all for tests as long as they are correct in the first place! Recently there was a question in a middle school exam: